And...We're Back.

The long absence from the blogosphere has had a few causes. It all began with my turn at battling food poisoning. It hit like someone flipped a switch and it all happened at the most inopportune time. It was nearing the deadline for our Carte de Sejour, or residence cards and the sloooow bureaucracy meant lots of meetings with deans, assistant deans, department heads, and the president of the university. The morning after the take down we had a meeting with the president.  I'd spent the night going from vomiting, to fever, to chills, to a 3am febrile viewing of Cleopatra and TWO cycles of Mrs. Doubtfire at 4 and 7am.  Waiting for the president was interminable due to the long wait in a heavily tiled and unheated building. It was FREEZING.  I tried to disguise the shakes and the fact that I had a plastic bag shoved in my coat pocket just in case sickness hit again. Above is a still life of the tv room showing the aftermath.

We've also had a number of events taking place. We had a great collaboration with L'institute Francais for an Environmental Event that included a some documentary viewing, discussion, and a desperately needed campus cleanup.  It was a great event with lots of student involvement. I wasn't just taking pictures the whole time...we cleaned up a lot of trash too...and if I see another little foil trident gum wrapper on campus, there will be serious consequences!

We wrapped up with some of the best Shwarma action in town.

School Days

Let's take a tour of how we spend our teaching days.  Here is the front of the University.  The best part of this campus in descending order is the students and dedicated teachers, the smell of warm eucalyptus trees in the sun, bright oranges hanging from trees near classrooms, and the olive trees. The rest is in rough shape. The campus is surrounded by some run-down areas with graffiti, litter, and stray dogs.  The university community is trying to put together some clean up events to raise awareness and impart some change.  It is difficult though...the campus serves the entire southern part of the country and is incredibly over taxed. It was built for 5,000 students and serves 16,000!  Classes are overcrowded, resources are limited and what they do have is outdated--a major frustration of students and faculty.  There are daily student marches and protests demanding better conditions and services.  It is a definite work in progress.

Here is the 'Faculty Entrance' to campus.

Some Eucalyptus and Olive Trees

One of my classrooms where students sometimes sit three to a desk.

The room has a number of interesting messages.

View from the window.

Here is some protest remnants where students blocked the blackboard. The 'white' board is becoming increasingly gray and clouded. In a darling display of defiance, the white board is refusing to erase, and the chalkboard has started to RESIST chalk.  I felt like I was writing in invisible ink. I later found out that you can only use certain brands of chalk, not the one they sell in the copy center. Lesson learned.

And the best part of being here: these students

 These are students in my Composition class. I laugh when I think about how it felt like such a burden to get 17 students in a writing class at UW. These students turn in ESSAYS....as far as the eye can see! But they are so lovely, you will gladly give them feedback until your hand becomes a claw you've been holding a pen so long!

TEFL & ICT Licence Professionnelle Students

I present to you my teacher training class.  Aren't they a bunch of darlings? They are so wonderful and bright and dedicated. We were joking this should be an advertisement for a reality show.
Some possible titles:

Who Wants to Be an English Teacher?

Morocco's Next Top Teacher

Moroccan English Teacher Idol

"You know what sounds good?"

This is a phrase we are using a lot these days. It is not particular to Morocco, but its use has increased ten-fold since we've been here.  The exchange is usually as follows:

'You know what sounds good?'
'What?'
'That pumpkin pie that is mixed with whipped cream so it is really light and custardy and usually called something like Chiffon Pumpkin Pie.' (This is Ryan's)
'Oooh. That DOES sound good.'

The only real variation to this exchange is whatever sounds good to the person. It is almost required that you agree with the person's craving though. I don't know why, but it is just nice to respond with affirmation.

You know what sounds good?

Fish tacos made with some type of beer-battered white fish, crunchy cabbage and chunks of avocado on warm corn tortillas with plenty of hot sauce.

Also: The exact cheese enchiladas I had with Jane in San Diego on that little patio in Ocean Beach with crunchy lettuce and thick tortillas...plus parrots squawking in the trees...plus Jane.

How It's Done in Morocco: Cleaning

Ryan's been finishing a book proposal and I've been working on coordinating a cultural event we are calling 'The Question of America'  and a number of other workshops in addition to the regular classes I'm teaching.  Whenever we get overwhelmed with work we tend to let the housekeeping go a bit, and let's just say it is getting a little Grey Gardens in here.  I wanted to do a post on cleaning because the tools and systems in our apartment have just enough examples to illustrate how what is 'normal' for one person in a culture, is so alien to another from a different culture.  It simply reinforces how our notions of how something should work, what it should look like, and what is 'normal' are so shaped by the context into which we are born.  I'm reminded of the late and wonderfully inspiring teacher from the Comparative History of Ideas department Jim Clowes and something he shared in a lecture.  At Christmas his mother always served a ham cut into slices and placed in a certain dish.  It wasn't until he attended a meal at another home that he saw a whole ham. He didn't even know it was ham.  When he mentioned it to his mother she said she always served it like that because she didn't have a large enough dish to serve it another way. His ham worldview was blown apart.  

Now we aren't seeing a lot of ham in these parts, but we have approached some of the aspects of living in Morocco with Jim Clowes' hammy wonder.  I'll give you a little tour of all the chores today that have become automatic now that we have been here almost 3 months! At first we approached using this stuff as if we were operating delicate equipment that maybe contained some type of mercury that could be released if not handled carefully. Now we can slam everything around with comfortable familiarity!

I give you...the washing machine.  Imagine a dorm refrigerator that is 4 feet tall.  

  When you open the top of the machine there is an empty metal drum with a small opening.  It can hold about 5 kilos of clothes, so you load it up and latch the little doors.

Then you pour soap in a little chute next to the trap doors, close it up and set it to 90 or 60 minutes.  Then your clothes do a hamster wheel rotation off and on until the machine starts shaking horribly and you know it is about done!

Another major adaptation is our use of gas.  These big tanks fuel our hot water and another one in the kitchen fuels the stove. We have to have our security guy, Mohammed, help us wheel out the empty ones and get new ones every few weeks. We are not gas people.  I love to cook with gas, but we have to light the flame OURSELVES here!  It's scary. The only comfort I have when we light off a huge mushroom cloud on the stove top every once in a while is this can't be THAT dangerous, right? Humans would be burning down apartment buildings constantly....right?!

To get the hot water going for the kitchen or bathroom you have to open the valve, and then push the igniter on this box attached to the wall.  When hot water is being heated the little window lights up from the mini furnace inside.  To think there was a time when I would linger in a hot shower. If you do that here, you end up with conditioner half rinsed from your hair, a cold reminder that you were lingering!

One of our cleaning tools that puzzled us was the mop. It is part mop, part squeegee. It didn't really fit in the mop bucket, so we would splash water on the ground and then move it around a little.  We had a supply of wide thick cotton rags, but we thought they were simply for general cleaning.  One day I was in a bookstore and because it had just rained, patrons kept tromping in mud and water. A cleaning lady was tasked with mopping it up and she had this amazingly effective technique AND she had the thick cotton towels!  The wide mop head is used for swiping the towels across the floor! First a wet one, then a dry one, and it is incredibly useful!  Far superior to the American style mop as you can cover a lot of ground with your swoopy motions. See...observing the locals teaches so much about how things are done!

Now that the laundry is done, the floors are mopped, and the dishes clean, I think I will bake a chocolate cake and destroy everything again! 

How It's Done in Morocco: Voting

The first legislative parliamentary vote since the King introduced some reforms to the constitution took place last Friday.  On my way to school I noticed that the streets, sidewalks, roundabouts, and even many bushes were covered in these small papers.  The image represents a different party and becomes their 'symbol' on the voting ballot. Pictured here is umbrella, and what seems like someone against wheat.  The papers swirled around in the traffic and it didn't seem like anyone was paying attention to them. It was as if someone crossed Agadir in a low flying helicopter and shook empty a bag of leaflets to scour the streets.  I wondered how long we would be trampling over them. Agadir is a particularly tidy city, but there can still be a lot of litter here and there.  Surprisingly, the next day most of the papers were gone. That mysterious helicopter did another pass and vacuumed everything up!  The results of the vote had the Justice and Development Party, a moderate Islamist party, winning the most seats.

The banner is encouraging people to vote, but what I like about this picture from the New York Times is it is a good snapshot of a lot of the types of young people we see in Agadir.  It is a very familiar grouping:  A couple being somewhat affectionate in public, some girls cover their hair, some don't, some dress more modestly, boys and girls hanging out together but usually mostly girls, and usually mostly boys...and most often a couple little ones running among the teenagers and grown ups.

Moroccan Thanksgiving 2011

OR: The Thanksgiving of the Pomegranate Chutney

A post dedicated to Hillary G. who is one half of the reigning King and Queen of creative jam making and canning and who would be very excited to make up a bunch of this in cute jars for gifts, and of course selfish consumption. Oh, yes, Hillary, we will have a major session upon our return!

We pulled off a satisfying meal with all the major players and a few special guest appearances.  Our biggest happy maker was an improvisation for cranberry sauce in the form of Pomegranate Chutney. Usually Ryan's parents make a big jar of delicious spiced whole crans with plenty of orange peel and it continues to dye our sandwiches and left-over plates for days following Turkey Day.  This year I couldn't find cranberries but was lucky enough to meet Ann, a former Peace Corps volunteer who lived in a small village outside of Agadir for two years. She is really into food and is working on a Moroccan cookbook, but more importantly knows how to make deliciousness out of all that IS available in southern Morocco...and thus Pomegranate Chutney.  She made this recipe riffing off a great aunt's Peach Chutney recipe. I had to improv even more by not adding any dried cranberries, using a dollop of raspberry jam for some pectin energy, and adding coarse black pepper.  The result was an awesome chutney jazz that is juicy, spicy and fruity, and perfectly suited to a Thanksgiving meal and even better on a post-Thanksgiving leftover baguette sandwich!

 Pomegranates are purely a fruit of paradise, they are temptation with a peel, and they are also a total pain to de-seed.  Luckily, amazing tips I didn't know came with Ann's recipe.  Slice the crown off the pom. quarter the rest and drop in water. Work out the seeds underwater.  The seeds float to the bottom, the juices don't get EVERYWHERE, and the parts you don't want FLOAT!  I love food trickery like this!

(also pictured is our BPA free cutting board that I brought all the way here!)

After cooking all the spices, onion, honey, vinegar and sugar down and stirring, stirring, stirring, the chutney cooled into this bejeweled beauty and took its place in the fridge until go-time.

We got to chopping sage and parsley and readied the rest of our ingredients.

A big score was that I found dried out bread at the store. This bag is the size of my torso and had enough for a huge pan of stuffing and enough left over for a huge pan of breakfast strata.

Entire sack = $0.46! I'll never be able to buy bread cubes in the US again.

The other special guest also came from Ann's inspiration: Moroccan Sweet Carrot Salad. A classic Moroccan salad in the sense that it is a few ingredients, put together simply, with ultra satisfying results.  This salad is 3-4 carrots grated finely, (pictured below) 1-2 apples peeled and grated coarsely, a touch of sugar and a touch of water, let juicify and combine in the fridge to ultimate Moroccan perfect yet again! It was such a great complement to all the starchiness and actually looked like bright yams on the plate.

Ryan wanted to document the fact that I actually cleaned up the entire kitchen BEFORE the meal. This is something I know is Cooking 101, but I rarely do entirely.  In a tiny kitchen where we had to use the top of the refrigerator for a surface, you just can't wait to clean! What you see in the picture is the extent of our counter space.

One slight frustration I've encountered is we can't find measuring cups or spoons A N Y W H E R E! I left mine at home thinking it would be a cinch to get some here. Nope. Luckily, one day I noticed my sports water bottle has cups AND milliliters on it. It has now become our go-to measuring device which is totally inconvenient, but will have to do until we can call in for reinforcements.

Ryan was on pie duty and had to improvise mostly in the tools and equipment department.

The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters crossed the Atlantic waters with us too!

Wine bottle rolling pin, just like the pioneers.

We drained the apples after they were tossed with sugar and cinnamon, and then combined the juice with more butter and a little flour to make it extra thick and caramely, recombined with the apples and voila...

Cute little pie.

With some roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, and homemade gravy in addition to the stuffing

 (double serving for me please), chutney and carrot salad, our Thanksgiving meal was complete.

Hope all of you at home had a good one too!